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SEO – How to sell it to your company

Learning about Search Engine Optimization is one thing. Anyone can load up some articles, read about some techniques, and try to apply them to your website. But what do you do when your company needs to adopt SEO practices?

Here’s something I learned through trial-by-fire: selling the concept of SEO is an incredibly easy task. Selling the practices, though, is difficult. Everyone wants to reap the benefits of increased traffic and better placement, but no one wants to commit to changing their behavior and work style.

Anecdotally, I recently took the plunge and introduced the concepts behind SEO to the company I work for. The idea was met with enthusiasm, for sure. The tasks were laid out, and it was decided that, experimentally, we would try it on one of our products.

This is where first resistance was met. Interestingly enough, the people who were fine with changing their ways were not the ones I expected. Content writers were fine with changing how they wrote, PMs were fine with building it into their schedule, Marketing was fine with a new method of keyword analysis and selection, and all three of these groups were fine with working together. In terms of the technical side of things, though, there were some bumps.

Briefly mentioning to some colleagues of mine some SEO concepts, I usually ran into disagreement. Things like how to redirect a page, or not to use Javascript to link were met with dissenting opinions. After some time, I was able to convince them, but at first there was backlash. I suppose that when you’ve been doing something for a while, it’s tough to hear that you should do it differently.

Another roadblock was from the design side. They wanted to have a specific way of naming images to make it easier for them, namely the idea of adding a prefix (m for menu, l for link, etc) to every image, including the page name in there, and using underscores. I suggested that, instead of using image names to convey organization, use folders and subfolders. /images/home/topnav/keyword-image-name.jpg, for example. That idea did not go over very well, not to everybody, and so the image names were not optimized.

To show you how important image names and other image-related factors can be, consider that just yesterday, I received a spike in traffic on this blog. After some investigation, it turns out I have received a TON of referrals from google image search, because my Macbook review page is the first result in a google image search for the term “macbook”. This garnered some serious traffic, so don’t try to argue that image names are irrelevant!

Another roadblock in selling SEO to the company as a whole is people who want to use SEO to cover their asses, or just improve their products before it is ready. One of the more important aspects of enterprise-level SEO is having a process in place. A process will severely reduce overhead for SEO and make it virtually transparent, once initial education costs are over with.

It can be tough in the meantime, as word of SEO and related success is sure to spread around the company. If you are the one taking this initiative, prepare yourself to get an onslaught of requests to implement SEO into sites. You’ll get lots of questions, like “how long would it take to implement on my project”, and “just tell me what to do so I can do it myself”. You’ll need to know how to deal with these kinds of requests, since your sell will likely garner these kinds of requests once or twice a day.

In short, you want to sell to the people that will allow you to quietly set up a process that will eventually get disseminated to the rest of the company. It can be really tough to do, sadly, but the payoff is more than worth it.

2 thoughts on “SEO – How to sell it to your company”

That’s a great question Bo. I work for a small technology company who has largely been flying by the seat of their pants. Our IT department is one person, and development is separate from “them”. And in fact, we create websites where I work as products in a way, but not for external clients.

Long story short, yeah, it’s required to sell in the sense of “selling” a consept, not making a sale where money changes hands. In other words, convincing them it’s a good idea and worth the time and effort to implement changes.